Back to basics with cleaner, safer prisons, vows minister

THE new Prisons Minister has pledged to go ‘back to basics’ to ensure jails are clean, safe and decent.

Rory Stewart, who has been in the job for two weeks, spoke out after inspectors condemned conditions at one prison as the worst ever seen in a British jail.

He told a Commons inquiry that he ‘disagreed’ with predecessors who felt it was not their job to get involved in the day-to-day details of running prisons.

Mr Stewart was giving evidence to the Justice Select Committee looking into conditions at HMP Liverpool.

Inspectors were appalled by the Category B jail, which was rife with rats, cockroaches, dirt, drugs and violence.

The minister said: ‘ My instinct is we need to get back to basics. We need to insist we are going to run clean, decent prisons. There have been too many very abstract conversations in the past two years about grand bits of prison policy.

‘We are turning up and saying, “Why is this a filthy prison” and asking, “Why has it not been cleaned” and people want to talk about grand issues of sentencing policy or reoffending policy.’ Instead, he said, officials should be ‘spending time on

‘This is disgusting. Sort it out’

the ground and saying “This is disgusting. Sort it out”.’

Mr Stewart visited HMP Liverpool on Monday and found that almost every cell window on one wing was broken.

‘If I’m not able in the next 12 months to achieve some improvements in making these prisons basically clean with more fixed broken windows and fewer drugs, I’m not doing my job,’ he added.

Michael Spurr, head of the Prison & Probation Service, admitted to MPs that it was a ‘personal failing of mine’ that he had not recognised the extent of the deterioration at Liverpool. This is despite the situation being pointed out in inspection reports in 2013 and 2015.

The committee hearing was called after last week’s inspection report revealed how HMP Liverpool was filthy with rats, cockroaches, broken windows and piles of rubbish. Private contractor Amey had a backlog of 2,000 maintenance jobs.

Some convicts were forced to live in damp cells that should be ‘condemned’, with exposed electrical wiring, broken windows and filthy, leaking lavatories.

Ministers are braced for figures out today showing self-harm, violence and assaults on jail guards are at record levels.